The true identity of the impostor on the seventeenth century map reverses the beginning of the colonial history of Barbados – ScienceDaily

A recent discovery by an SFU archaeologist sheds new light on the issue. Christina Giovas discovered the jawbone of a peccary, a South American mammal that looks like a wild pig, while looking for a larger project on prehistoric animal introductions in the Caribbean .

"I had not given him much notice at the time, but I had simply collected it with other bones," said Giovas, the principal author of a recently published study in PLOS ONE. "It was completely unexpected and honestly I thought I had made a mistake with the identification of the species."

Giovas and colleagues, George Kamenov and John Krigbaum of the University of Florida, radiographed the bone with a radiocarbon and performed an isotopic analysis of strontium to determine age and determine if the pecari was born in Barbados or had been imported elsewhere.

The results showed that the peccary was local and dated from 1645-1670, when the English wrote their account of finding wild pigs from Europe on the Caribbean island. The researchers were not only able to demonstrate that it had been introduced into a historic peccary, but that the first famous maps of the region represented peccaries that had been confused with pigs by the English.

Giovas says the results upset the accepted colonial history of Barbados and reflect the speed with which Europeans began to alter the environments of the New World by changing the distribution of species.

"By checking the historical and archaeological records, we determined that the most likely source of introduction of peccaries came from Spanish or Portuguese ships passing off the island in the 16th century – and probably remained as a source of meat for future visitors, "she says.

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